AJAX
AJAX is a web development technique for creating interactive web applications. The intent is to make web pages feel more responsive by exchanging small amounts of data with the server behind the scenes, so that the entire web page does not have to be reloaded each time the user requests a change. This is intended to increase the web page's interactivity, speed, and usability. In short, AJAX applications work faster and make the web work more like a desktop application.
AJAX has several benefits to web development, including:
- Speed of applications, making AJAX particularly useful for frequently-used systems such as extranets, intranets or administration areas.
- Improvements to the user experience since with AJAX, the page often can be updated dynamically, allowing a faster response to the user's interaction.
- More efficient bandwidth usage with “load on demand” which makes AJAX web pages appear to load relatively quickly since the payload coming down is much smaller in size.
AJAX is an acronym for "Asynchronous JavaScript and XML" and AJAX is not a technology in itself, but a term that refers to the use of a group of technologies. The AJAX technique uses a combination of:
- XHTML (or HTML) and CSS, for marking up and styling information
- DOM accessed with a client-side scripting language, especially ECMAScript implementations such as JavaScript and JScript, to dynamically display and interact with the information presented.
- XMLHttpRequest object to exchange data asynchronously with the web server.
- XML sometimes used as the format for transferring data between the server and client, although any format will work, including preformatted HTML, plain text, JSON and even EBML.